Roughly two months ago I decided to sign up for the Hilton Head Marathon on February 10th, 2018. Why? Why not! I was 5 months removed from uni football with no real desire to stare at myself in a mirror lifting weights and the thought of saying I’ve ran a marathon sounded pretty cool.
Through all of my years of playing football, one thing I never enjoyed was running. I’ve never really ran further than 3 miles at a time up until now and I pretty much viewed long distance running as something for people who couldn’t play any other sports. Nevertheless, with 6 months to go till the race, I began to run a couple times a week. This consisted of me dying in the Carolina sun, regretting every step I was taking, struggling with shin splints, and making excuses to why I didn’t have to run that day. But, for some reason, I still thought I would be able to do it and that I would start training properly next week…then the next week…then the next week.
Two weeks ago, I went to get dinner with my pal Gill to catch up and during our conversations, I mentioned that I had signed up for this marathon. Gill, being a former collegiate cross-country athlete, told me straight away, “You need a partner” and before the night was over, he had signed up for the race and we agreed that we would start training together. Like magic, the painful three mile runs suddenly got easier. During the first week training together, we ran four times, running over 20 miles that week. The pains and aches disappeared and I started to look forward to our runs.
Last week was the second week we’ve trained together. We ran a total of 26.2 miles (by chance) feeling really comfortable in last Sunday’s long run of 10 miles and looking forward to stepping up the mileage in the weeks to come.
If the training has taught me anything so far, it’s the power of partnership and how much more you are able to achieve when you start working with someone with the same goal. We keep each other accountable, while sharing the achievements along the way.
If you want to want follow our daily progress, follow me on Strava @RyanEjezie or Gill @AlexGuillaume, where we record all our daily runs.
- Ryan